Tuesday, 17 January 2017

I'm the Princess! - Diaries by Alan Bennett and Carrie Fisher

I began 2017 reading Alan Bennett and
Carrie Fisher – both books are a blend of memoir and diary extracts. ‘Keeping
On Keeping On’ is a seven hundred page not-quite extravaganza, more of a
consoling compendium, and that’s what Alan Bennett has become for me. He’s the
figure who turns up and tells you that all is – perhaps not quite well - but at
least doing as well as might be expected.

The ten years’ worth of diary extracts are
the highlight of this volume. I’m less interested in the two plays at the end,
which I found quite tricky to read, and the introductions to other plays and
books which pad out the second half of the book. I wonder why Faber think his
fans are as completist as this? There’s quite a lot of repetition of ideas and underlining
of the same themes and, while I hardly ever disagree with what he says, I do
find the repetition tiring in the end. In a book of this length and with so
little editorial crack-down Alan B comes to seem like the J K Rowling of
shuffling about and watching the world go by.

No doubt he would hate to hear this, but
he’s best when he’s writing about what happens when he pops into the local shop
and some woman bumps into him and says something pithy, well-meaning and odd.
Those are his greatest bits. I could do with hearing less about Britten and
Larkin and Auden and I could definitely hear less about church furnishings and
much more about the woman in the post office, or the one outside the corner
shop. I like it best when he’s interested in living people and the random
bumping-into that seems to go on around him.

The switch into Carrie Fisher’s
also-recently published memoir, ‘The Princess Diaries’ was startling. I was
transported back to 1976 and I was amazed to find how young and funny and
dweeby the cast of Star Wars all were. How unaware they were of starring in
something that would end up attracting so much attention. They were not quite
iconic and each having a slightly dull time of it – the highlight being meals
in London restaurants and stolen snogs in the back of hired cars. It’s very
sweet and banal – this tale of being a pretend-Princess who falls into having
weekend sex with a man who can barely talk to her, while during work hours
they’re saving the galaxy.

My favourite bit in the whole book comes
when the film is released and takes off like a rocket. Carrie and her
girlfriends are cruising around LA in a car, staring amazed at the queues going
round the block (hence the term ‘blockbuster’ – which I never knew!) When she
sees the biggest queue of all, Carrie springs half out of the car’s sun roof
and yells at everyone: ‘I’m in that movie! I’m the Princess!’ Then, when people
start to cotton on and pay attention, she thinks: ‘Uh-oh!’ She comes to her
senses, dives back into the car and yells at her friend: ‘Drive away!’

The actual verbatim diary extracts from
1976 are neither here nor there. Sort of Dorothy Parker - the teenage years. A
bit of lovelorn poetry and a lot of longing. But they’re amazing to read
because they’re so ordinary, and because she wasn’t having the time of her life
at all.

Later chapters describe the fandom and
convention circuit – her later career in ‘lapdancing’ as she calls it. There’s
some very funny material here, in what is perhaps the definitive account of the
vast, commercial sf conventions. The highlight of the whole book for me are the
monologues she writes in the voices of fans who have come to see her: extolling
her virtues, bubbling and gushing, accidentally insulting her, and giving so
much away about their own lives. These are monologues almost as good as Alan
Bennett’s own. Her essays are pithy, her memories are entertaining – but it’s her
pin-sharp observation of people, and her pitch-perfect ear for everyday speech
that shows up as the most brilliant of her talents.

It’s a sculptural gift: carving and editing
out the verbiage and leaving a perfect monologue. Leaving a perfect column of
utterance on the page – that’s the real thing. And that’s the thing that both
these wonderful writers – on the surface so very different – have in common.